Topher, an avid Mac user for the past 15 years, has been a contributing author to MacFixIt since the spring of 2008. One of his passions is troubleshooting Mac problems and making the best use of Macs ...

Have you ever entered “ls –l” into a UNIX command line and seen something like this? Do you wonder what the “drwxr–r– “ means or why you can’t edit, open, or even read some files or directories? Well, ...

When transferring text files between Linux/Unix and Windows systems, you may encounter issues with line breaks and file formatting. This is because Windows uses both a line feed (LF) and a carriage ...

There are four ways to specify that a file is in UNIX System Services when you use the FILENAME statement or FILENAME function: You can also use these specifications in combination. For example, you ...

I’ve followed your guide to building a home server with FreeNAS, but I’m not sure what to do with the permissions on my files. Can I just set them all to 777, or is that insecure? This stuff is like ...

There are many ways to move files between Unix and Windows. In my mind, they fall into three categories — secure copy (let’s not even think about ftp), shared drives, and file synchronization. Each ...

One of the questions that Unix users are sometimes reluctant to ask is how all the directory names — like /etc, /var and /usr/local — came about in the first place. Why did we adopt the particular ...

Unix systems provide numerous ways to compare files. The most common way to verify that you have received or downloaded the proper file is to compute a checksum and compare it against one computed by ...

The ZIP archive is recognized by most operating systems, thus making it useful for compressing and archiving files regardless of the OS that your employees or customers use. If your company uses one ...